Shanghai on my own…

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Well, when Tracy was tied up in a meeting on Saturday, I went to Yu Yuan to have some famous dumplngs from the same place where Wendy’s parents had taken me in 2007:

Dumpling chefs at Yu Yuan's famous restaurant...

The famous dumplings...

Because it was such a long line, I got two orders (just in case I wanted to eat more). I only wanted two or three more before I was pretty stuffed. I have the other order to a lady who was getting plastic bottles out of the trash. She was very appreciative, so all turned out well!

Then, after I had tea with Tracy that afternoon, I went walking around to see what I could see. I found an area that was more like a hutong, where there were no wairen (foreigners) and it made me feel a little better. Shanghai had more foreigners than I saw anywhere else, and while most were friendly enough, it just reminded me an era not too long ago when foreigners came in and set up in what were called “treaty port” cities, including Shanghai. These were gained by invasions by other countries, including the United States, England and Japan. This is another part of US history that I don’t remember learning in my American History class. It is amazing how biased and editorial the learning we get in our supposed “free” country is.

This is not to say, of course, that it is any different elsewhere. In the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, for instance, there was little mention of the fact that the United States ended the war with Japan, with the Chinese government largely withdrawn to the Southwest of China waiting for this to happen. There was no mention of the A-bombs at all. So, every country tells its citizens a completely distorted version of events. I wish that we could get an unbiased version of history, but it seems like human nature prevents it.

Anyway, after wandering around until evening, I went to the Hotel, got all my camera gear and headed to the waterfront. I was going to take some great pictures (yes, with a tripod, Dennis (and Ken))…

…was I in for a big disappointment!!! The waterfront was a construction zone, getting ready for a Shanghai Expo 2010. So, you couldn’t walk along it, or even get a picture of the famous Pudong skyline, and you could only get the Bund buildings (as the main one in this post) from the same side of the street.

Well, I took the tourist tunnel, hoping to get some good pictures in there and on the Pudong side…

You are now entering a dimension of sight and sound...

The pearl tower from an unpleasing perspective...

The only bright spot of my photographic night was in the tourist tunnel itself! In fact, some of the exposures and processing I was able to do I thought came out really cool!

I will do a final post from China featuring these abstract creations in bigger sizes (I apologize in advance to those of you with smaller screens).

The next morning, I went to the airport and had a pretty uneventful trip home. All the flights were on time and there were no problems of any sort. What a pleasant surprise!

I want to thank all of my friends in the US and in China for making my trip so enjoyable and for traveling along with me as I posted on my blog. I don’t really like this blog format, but it is OK for photographs. The problem is that it’s too difficult to do some simple blog reading (to figure out what post is what, for instance).

So, I am already thinking about going to Europe in a couple of years…

Until then, enjoy life, it’s shorter than you think!

Scott